Devil May Care

by Sebastian Faulks

  He went to gather his belongings without another word.

  6. Quite a Girl

  When he emerged from the shower, Bond found no trace of Gorner in the changing room, though on top of his racquet was a white envelope, stiff with banknotes. On it was written: ‘À bientôt.’

  Bond tracked down Scarlett to one of the upstairs bars, where she sat on a stool in the window, innocently sipping a drink.

  ‘Did you enjoy your game, James?’

  ‘Good exercise. I think I lost a few pounds. Not as many as Gorner.’

  ‘But you did win?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And are you going to take me out to lunch to celebrate?’

  Bond pushed back his hair, which was still damp from the shower, and smiled at the girl’s earnest expression. ‘Let’s have a drink first,’ he said.

  Bond joined Scarlett in the window, bringing a fresh citron pressé for her, a litre of Vittel and a bottled beer for himself.

  Scarlett crossed her legs and turned to Bond. ‘It all seemed to come right for you just at the end.’

  ‘You were watching?’

  ‘From a safe distance. I didn’t want Gorner or Chagrin to see me.’

  Bond nodded.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Scarlett, with an enigmatic smile, ‘that you seemed to have no luck at all until the last three games.’

  ‘That can happen in any sport,’ said Bond. ‘Golf, tennis …’

  ‘Well, it seemed more than a coincidence to me,’ said Scarlett, ‘so I did some investigation.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘Every time you hit the ball into the netcord, it seemed to rebound out of play. Gorner’s shots never seemed to touch the net. I became suspicious.’

  Bond leaned forward, intrigued despite himself. ‘And?’

  ‘I noticed that your court was the only one without a handle on the net post to tighten the net – that the cord just ran down out of sight.’

  ‘Yes, I presume there’s a wheel let into the ground there.’

  Scarlett laughed. ‘Not so fast, James. I worked out whereabouts indoors would be directly under the net post and went to have a look. I reckoned it would be a small storeroom to one side of the indoor courts. I found my way to the room and looked through the glass in the door. And there was Mr Chagrin, watching television.’

  ‘Television?’

  ‘Yes, on closed circuit, like the ones in the entry hall. But in this room there’s a monitor with a console which allows you to follow any of the games going on outside. You know, like the director’s room in a television studio. And Chagrin was watching your game.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There was a brass handle attached to a wheel in the concrete wall. It seemed to have something that looked very like a netcord running down to it. Depending on who was serving, Chagrin could turn the handle one way or the other to raise or lower it. Very simple – just an extra long netcord.’

  ‘So that’s why Gorner insisted on playing on Court Two.’

  ‘Chagrin waited till he could see on the screen that your back was turned,’ said Scarlett. ‘He’d got the cord wound so tight when you were serving that any shot of yours that touched it just flew out.’

  ‘And Gorner kept hitting it with his racquet between games. Presumably that was some sort of signal. So what did you do?’

  ‘I ran upstairs and looked around till I found someone I knew. A young man called Max, who works for Rothschild’s. He’s asked me out a few times and I knew he’d want to help. Obviously the staff are all in on Gorner’s little game, so I couldn’t go to the secretary or anything. Anyway, I got Max to go into the storeroom and tell Chagrin he knew what he was up to and if he didn’t stop fixing the net that he, Max, would go on court and tell you in front of Gorner.’

  ‘At what point in the game was this?’ said Bond.

  ‘I’m not sure exactly. By the time Max had got Chagrin out of there and reported the all-clear to me, it must have been well into the third set.’

  ‘Then what did you do?’

  Scarlett looked slightly ashamed. ‘I took Chagrin’s place and made things a bit fairer.’

  Bond smiled. ‘That must have been when he smashed his racquet. He thought it was impossible for him to serve a double fault.’

  ‘I’m afraid so. But I only raised it a fraction. Nothing like as much as Chagrin had been doing.’

  ‘And for me?’

  ‘I let it go back to the correct height. So all those lovely winners you hit were legitimate.’

  Bond smiled. ‘You’re quite a girl, aren’t you, Scarlett?’

  ‘So now am I invited to lunch?’

  ‘I think it’s … destiny,’ said Bond.

  ‘Good,’ said Scarlett, jumping down from her stool. ‘First I shall show you the Sainte Chapelle. Culture before gluttony. I don’t suppose you’ve ever been there, have you?’

  ‘I’ve always been too busy for rubbernecking,’ said Bond.

  ‘I’ll go and get the car,’ said Scarlett. ‘See you on the steps.’

  There was a short queue of weekend sightseers outside the Sainte Chapelle, but after ten minutes Bond and Scarlett were inside. The ground floor was bare and unremarkable, largely taken up by an extensive souvenir stall.

  ‘Not impressed, are you?’ said Scarlett.

  ‘It’s like a bazaar.’

  ‘My father told me that outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem he was offered an egg from the cock that crew.’

  ‘The cock that –’

  ‘When Peter denied Christ for the third time.’

  ‘Improbable.’

  ‘For a number of reasons.’

  ‘And what’s special about this place?’ said Bond.

  ‘This is,’ said Scarlett. ‘Follow me.’

  She went to a stone staircase and began to climb. Bond followed, watching the muscles of her slim calves and thighs in the shadow of the short linen dress.

  The upper chapel was a blaze of stained glass.

  ‘It was a miracle of engineering,’ said Scarlett. ‘They managed to build it without flying buttresses to support it, otherwise you’d see them and they’d spoil the pictures in the glass.’

  Scarlett spent some minutes walking round the chapel, and Bond watched the reflections of the coloured glass as they played across the stone floor and over the slim figure of the girl who so admired them. Her enthusiasm seemed quite guileless. Either she was the most accomplished actress he had ever met, or she was what she claimed to be.

  She came back and lightly took his arm. ‘That’s your culture for today, James. Now you can take me to La Cigale Verte. It’s only five minutes away. We can leave the car here and walk along the river.’

  The restaurant she’d chosen on the Île St Louis had a long terrace overlooking the Seine with only a footpath between the tables and the river.

  ‘I was rather presumptuous, I’m afraid,’ said Scarlett, as the maître d’ greeted them. ‘When I saw which way the game was going I telephoned to book a table. It’s very popular at the weekend.’

  The maître d’, who seemed unable to take his eyes off Scarlett, ushered them to a table directly overlooking the river and the Left Bank beyond.

  ‘Do you like shellfish?’ said Scarlett. ‘They do a spectacular selection. Langoustines, crab, little flat-faced spiky things that look like Chagrin … And they make this wonderful mayonnaise. It’s the best in Paris. Shall I order for you, too? Will you trust me?’

  ‘Trust you? Why ever not? Then we’ll talk business,’ said Bond.

  ‘But of course.’

  Bond felt elated by the tennis, and hungry too. The waiter brought a bottle of Dom Pérignon and some olives. The cold bubbles fizzed on Bond’s dry throat.

  ‘Now, Scarlett, I want to hear all about Dr Julius Gorner.’

  ‘I first heard of him through my father, Alexandr,’ said Scarlett, pulling the tail of a langoustine from its shell. ‘My grandfather came to England dur
ing the Revolution. He had estates near St Petersburg and a house in Moscow. My grandfather was an engineer by training, but he managed to get some of the family money out of Russia and he bought a house near Cambridge. My father was only about seven years old when they fled and he hardly remembers Russia. He became bilingual in English and went to very good schools and eventually became a fellow of a college in Cambridge, where he taught economics. During the war he worked for British Army Intelligence, and afterwards he was offered a senior post at Oxford, where he encountered Gorner, who’d gone there as a mature student.’

  ‘So your father taught Gorner?’

  ‘Yes, though he said he was an unreceptive student and loath to admit there was anything he didn’t already know.’

  ‘But he was clever?’

  ‘My father said that with more humility he could have been the best economist in Oxford. But the trouble was, he blamed my father when things started to go wrong.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘According to my father, his manner alienated people.’

  ‘So he was like that even then.’

  ‘He had this Baltic or Lithuanian accent and of course … the hand. But that was all right. I think people felt sorry for him. But he was crooked. He cheated in exams – though according to my father he didn’t need to. He was contemptuous of the undergraduates, because he was a bit older and had fought in the war.’

  ‘For both sides, I gather,’ said Bond.

  ‘Perhaps he wanted to be on the winning side,’ said Scarlett. ‘And he had undoubtedly seen things at Stalingrad – or Volgograd as they’re trying to call it again now – that made him feel older, or more worldly … But quite a few of the British students had broken off their studies to go and fight.’

  Scarlett was interrupted by the waiter, who had come to clear the remains of the shellfish.

  ‘You’re going to have fried sole now,’ said Scarlett. ‘Can I order some wine?’

  ‘Be my guest. Or Gorner’s,’ said Bond, tapping the thick envelope in his breast pocket.

  Scarlett lit a cigarette, pulled her feet up under her on the red-cushioned seat and wrapped her arms round her ankles. As the sun disappeared behind a tall building, she pushed her dark glasses on to the top of her head and, Bond thought, looked suddenly younger. Her dark brown eyes engaged his.

  ‘Gorner became obsessed by the fact that people didn’t like him and he put it all down to xenophobia. He viewed Oxford as an élite English club that wouldn’t let him join. I imagine one or two of the rowing types probably did tease him, but my father reassured me that most of them were perfectly polite and kind. I think it was this experience that somehow put the iron in his soul and he determined to take his revenge on what he saw as the stuck-up English. He became obsessed by English culture and all that rather dreary stuff about cricket and fair play and tea-time. He thought it was all a gigantic fraud. He took it far more seriously than any English person. He made a fetish of British foreign policy and the Empire and thought he could show how brutal and unfair it had all been. I suppose the whole process must have taken some years to come to fruition but, to cut a long story short, he hated England because he felt it had laughed at him, and he decided to devote his life to destroying it.’

  ‘Perhaps he’d already had feelings like that,’ said Bond.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When he changed sides in the war. Perhaps, when it became clear that the Nazis couldn’t beat the British, he thought the Russians were the next best bet.’

  ‘That’s clever of you, James. I didn’t know you were such a psychologist.’

  ‘The waiter wants you to try the wine.’

  Scarlett gave the Bâtard Montrachet a quick sniff. ‘Très bien. Where was I?’

  ‘Being flattering.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Well, my father got wind of the fact that Gorner was unhappy and he tried to sympathize. He was only a tutor that Gorner went to see occasionally, he had no responsibility for his welfare, but my father’s a kind man. He asked him to dinner at our house. Poppy and I must have been there, as little girls, but I don’t remember. He sympathized with him about being an outsider and told him his own father had found it hard, coming from Russia, but that England had a good reputation with immigrants. Half the science faculty at Cambridge were Jewish émigrés, for heaven’s sake. Then my father made his big mistake. He asked him about his hand.’

  Bond put down his knife and fork. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘My father said he’d known someone in Cambridge before the war – in Sidney Sussex College, I don’t know why I remember that – who had the same thing. He was trying to be reassuring, to let Gorner know he wasn’t the only one with this peculiarity, but I suppose it was something Gorner’d never spoken about before. I suppose he was very ashamed of it. As though he or his family hadn’t properly evolved.’

  Bond nodded and filled their glasses.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Scarlett, ‘as a result, far from being his friend, a fellow exile, Gorner viewed my father as even worse than the English – as a kind of successful traitor, a turncoat who’d become one of the enemy. From that day onwards he wore a glove over his hand. And he had a new burning hatred to add to his list. At joint number one with England and its culture were Alexandr Papav and his family.’

  ‘A list I feel I’ve joined this morning,’ said Bond.

  Scarlett clinked her glass against his. ‘To the enemies of Julius Gorner. Anyway, many years later, he came across Poppy. And that was when he saw his chance.’

  As the waiter brought a cheeseboard and fresh bread, Bond looked down the Seine to where the pleasure boats stopped to deposit their passengers. The most popular tourist boat, he noticed, was a Mississippi paddle steamer – the Huckleberry Finn – with a banner on the hull that said she was on loan to the city of Paris for one month only.

  Bond brought his eyes back to the table. ‘You’d better tell me about Poppy.’

  ‘Poppy …’ Scarlett cut a slice of Camembert and put it on Bond’s plate. ‘Try that. Poppy … Well, Poppy’s not that much like me … She’s a bit younger and … She never took her studies very seriously.’

  ‘Unlike you,’ said Bond.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And where did you go to school?’

  ‘Roedean. Don’t laugh. It’s not funny. Then I went to Oxford, to Somerville.’

  ‘Where you were doubtless awarded a first-class degree, like Gorner.’

  Scarlett coloured a little. ‘My father said that boasting of exam results was the height of vulgarity. Poppy didn’t go to university. She went to live in London and moved with rather a fast set of people. She went to a lot of parties. For some reason I don’t understand, she decided she wanted to be an air hostess. I suppose it just seemed glamorous to her. Jet travel was still quite a novelty. And I suppose she was rebelling against her academic family. My mother was a consultant at the Radcliffe hospital and she also had high expectations of us. Anyway, Poppy worked for BOAC for three years. She fell in love with one of the pilots. He was married and he kept saying he’d leave his wife, but he didn’t. Poppy was very unhappy. In the course of a layover in Morocco, she tried taking drugs. Just a little. But soon she was taking more. Partly for fun, I suppose, but also because she was miserable. Then, at some point, her lover went to see Gorner in Paris because he was fed up with the BOAC routes and he’d seen an advertisement Gorner had placed. He needed a pilot for his private planes. In the course of following up his references, Gorner got to hear about Poppy and, of course, recognized the name. He pounced. He told the pilot he wasn’t interested in him, but offered Poppy a huge amount of money to go and work for him. And a lot of flying and perks and holidays. Clothes. Shoes.’

  ‘Anything else?’ said Bond.

  ‘Yes. One other thing.’ Scarlett bit her lip. ‘He offered her drugs.’

  ‘And that was a lure for her?’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’ There were tears on the lower lids of Scarlet
t’s eyes. ‘He was able to promise her an unlimited supply of anything she wanted, and it would be good quality, not mixed with poison or anything, as it can be if you buy on the street. And I suppose it looked like a way in which she could control her habit and always have the money for it. Although, in fact, the drugs were free.’ Scarlett wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘She was such a gentle girl. She always was.’

  The waiter brought fresh pineapple and cream.

  With the dark espresso that followed, Bond lit a cigarette and offered one to Scarlett. ‘So, Scarlett, if I find her, will she come? Or is she a willing slave?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her for two years, so I don’t really know. I’ve occasionally managed to speak to her on the telephone. The last time was just the other day. She was in Tehran and had managed to get to the post office.’

  ‘Tehran?’

  ‘Yes, Gorner has a big business interest there. It may be a front. I don’t know. But Poppy told me she was making efforts to come off the drugs. It’s very difficult. But I think she would come if you were able to find her. Then we could get her into a clinic. The trouble is, Gorner won’t let her go. He’s slowly killing her, and he’s loving every moment of it.’

  Bond swore succinctly. Then he said, ‘Don’t cry, Scarlett. I’ll find her.’

  After one more coffee, Scarlett drove Bond back to his hotel, keeping the Sunbeam rather closer to the speed limit than she had on the way to the Bois.

  ‘You’ll call me with any news, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Bond. ‘If I’m near a telephone.’

  She leaned over from her seat and kissed his cheek. She had put on her sunglasses to conceal her swollen eyes.

  Bond’s hand lingered for a second on the red linen dress. Something about this girl had got right under his defences, and he felt profoundly uneasy.

  He was tempted to turn and wave from the door of the hotel, as Mrs Larissa Rossi had waved from the lift in Rome, but forced himself to push straight through and into the gloom of the lobby.

  ‘Monsieur Bond,’ said the receptionist. ‘A cable for you.’